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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  12hr ago (text post)   126 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 27, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.

Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:

  1. The query letter. If the query letter doesn't make the book sound compelling, or doesn't make a persuasive business case that the book will be a commercial success, or makes it sound like it would be difficult to sell to a publisher (e.g. too long, too short, uncertain genre and audience), it's an automatic reject.
  2. The synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query letter, but the synopsis is confusing and disorganised without a clear sense of narrative progression or story structure, it's a reject.
  3. The excerpt. If the query letter tickles the agent's fancy and the synopsis sounds logical and engaging, but the first three chapters are poorly written, it's a reject.
  4. The full manuscript. If the query letter, synopsis and first three chapters are solid, the agent will request the full manuscript. But having read the full thing, they might decide it's not up to standard and pass on it.

So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 100 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, a million words a year is 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.

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